The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [114]
They reached Corinth in mid-afternoon. After trudging around the Temple of Apollo in a mild drizzle, they repaired to a restaurant to get out of the rain, and Mitchell took out his New Testament to reacquaint himself with what Saint Paul had written to the Corinthians back around AD 55.
He read:
For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent:
And:
For ye are yet carnal
It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you
It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
The woman who’d given him the pocket New Testament had left her card inside, along with an Athens phone number. Her name was Janice P.
She must have been reading over my shoulder, Mitchell decided.
Winter was coming on. From Corinth they took a minibus southward toward the Mani, stopping for the night in the small mountain village of Andritsena. The temperature was crisp, the air pine-scented, the local retsina a shocking pink. The only room they could find was above a taverna. It was unheated. As thunderclouds moved in from the north, Larry got into one of the beds, complaining about the cold. Mitchell kept his sweater on. When he was sure Larry was asleep, he took out Madeleine’s letter and began reading it by the faint red light on the bedside table.
To his surprise, the letter itself wasn’t typed but handwritten in Madeleine’s tiny script. (She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.)
Aug. 31, 1982
Dear Mitchell,
I’m writing this from the train, the same Amtrak you and I took when you came to Prettybrook for Thanksgiving sophomore year. It was colder then, the trees were bare, and my hair was “feathered” (it was still the seventies, if you’ll remember). But you didn’t seem to mind.
I’ve never told you this before, but the entire way down on the train for Thanksgiving, I was thinking about sleeping with you. For one thing, I could tell that you wanted to very badly. I knew it would make you happy and I wanted to make you happy. Aside from that, I had the idea that it would be good for me. I’d only slept with one boy at that point. I was worried that virginity was like getting your ears pierced. If you didn’t keep an earring in, the hole might close up. Anyway, I went off to college prepared to be as unemotional and dastardly as a guy. And you appeared in that little window of opportunity.
Then of course you were devastatingly charming all weekend. My parents loved you, my sister started flirting with you—and I got possessive. You were my guest, after all. So I went up to the attic one night and sat on your bed. And you did exactly Nothing. After about a half hour, I went back downstairs. At first I just felt insulted. But after a while I felt mad. I decided you weren’t man enough for me, etc. I vowed never to sleep with you, ever, even if you wanted to. Then, the next day, we took the train back to Providence, and we laughed the whole way. I realized that it was much better this way. For once in my life I wanted to have a friend who wasn’t a girlfriend and wasn